No Other Pearl
by brandend
Summary: Five couples whose affairs ended in death, heartbreak, or separation, and one whose didn't. WIP.
1. Ned, Catelyn

_To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life._  
>-Victor Hugo<p>

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**Ned**

Tonight, for once, they are alone.

That is rare now; more often than not, with the long summer and its sudden storms, come the frightened children to bed. Robb and Arya insist that the thunder does not scare them, that they only accompany Bran, Sansa, and baby Rickon, afeared of storms and gales. Ned knows better and cradles trembling Arya, so like her brave mother, so like the aunt she never knew, as Catelyn nurses Rickon, strokes Bran's mess of hair. Their babes, their sweet babes, sleep in warmth and solace.

Tonight, at last, the Lord and Lady are alone, are one. She melds to him, almost, and there he feels the heat of flame and ember, all glory in the shadows of her hair.

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**Catelyn  
><strong>  
>Rickon remembers no mother but Osha, no father but the wilds of Skagos, no brothers but wolves.<p>

When Rickon returns to Winterfell from Skagos and White Harbour a man grown, fourteen and barely bearded, but a man nonetheless in valour, Osha shepherds him into the crypts. Rickon remembers _those_, with their stone kings set hard on immarcesible thrones, their eyes unseeing upon rust-cankered swords. The father whose face he cannot recall is one of them – that had been Manderly's doing, he knows – and the mother who comes to him in dreams, whose eyes are ash and whose visage is only blackness, is waiting.

Stoneheart, they had called her, and stone she looks in her rotting pall; her face is sunken and pearly-grey with flecks of mould, worms twining in her hair like cold licks of languid flame. Three days she had lain dead, he had been told, and years she had roamed the world, brought back he cannot fathom how, in search of vengeance, her children, her Sansa and her Arya and her Brandon, all bone and moss and loam, now.

No Stark was Catelyn, but others had insisted. Sansa, too, and Arya had there found their sleep, as had what little had been found of Robb. None of them Rickon remembers, either, though his own countenance he recognises in their long and sombre effigies, and their granite eyes bore on him as, unmoving, he watches his mother's bier lowered into his father's tomb. Their babes, their sweet babes, the wolf-gnawed, the fallen, the murdered, and the lordling beside them, have come home.

"No elegy, Lord Stark?"

Rickon blinks. "I didn't know her."

Osha's hand is warm upon his shoulder. "She was your mother."

"I don't remember."

"Might be someday you will," she says gently, "or might be someday you won't. She loved you all the same, enough to die o' lookin' for you."

Rickon says nothing, only glints at the tomb, at letters he cannot read that form names vaguely familiar yet wholly strange. Eddard. Catelyn. Strangers. With a discomfited sigh, he sulks away, grabbing the torch from Osha as he goes.

"I've kept 'im safe, m'lord, m'lady, as best I can," she whispers before following him. "Rest you quiet now."

Alone in the cold and lightless crypts, the Lord and Lady sleep with immemorial kings whose steel guards naught but dust. Once more she melds to him, and the hair Ned loved, now grey and brittle, moulders where it spans his breastless ribs.


	2. Rhaegar, Lyanna

_Devictus serpens.__  
><em>-Ovid

* * *

><p><strong>Rhaegar<strong>

I.  
>He dreams of dragons, dead. He dreams of them arched and rotting in a great sea of grass, sun-swollen and blackened, one fire-crowned and moulding. He dreams of them, bones shattered and bloody, in the halls of kings. One lies slain in a void of ice, smoke rising in the sloughing of its scales. He dreams of them living, too, and when the boy rides them, a sword burns red in his hand, and a waste of snow stretches beneath a spread of wings.<p>

_Dreams have no meaning, my sweet, nor are they truths, _Rhaella says. _No dragons live._

_But I do,_ he cries.

.

II.  
>They speak of <em>him<em>, the songs in worm-holed pages, he's sure. _A promised prince; his will be the song of ice and fire. A hero reborn. The sword that saves the realm. The fire that burns against the cold. The last dragon. The dragon must have three heads, three riders. The world must have the dragons, or else perish._

He knows what he must do.

.

III.  
>The first do not fulfil him.<p>

Elia should have been strong, born of fire, hardened, yet she lies weakened in the birthing bed, her – _his _– son curled in her trembling arms, no dragon he.

_There must be another, born of ice and fire. That much we have discussed,_ he says, smoothing the lad's dark hair. _If that you cannot give me…_

_The master says I cannot_, Elia snaps, but soon something in her softens._ Do as you will, my lord._

_As I must_, _Elia, _he corrects her. _As I must._

_._

IV.  
>He finds her at Harrenhal. She is the only daughter of a northern lord, as skilled as a girl can be in weaponry, with lively eyes so grey they're black, like dragonsteel.<p>

_The rose of Winterfell,_ he whispers to Elia. _Bael too plucked a rose of Winterfell. Her. It will be her._

He lays a winter rose in Lyanna's lap, and she does not protest.

.

V.  
>When he takes Lyanna, full-willing, she is silent when he groans her name into the hollows of her breasts. <em>Rhaegar<em>, she whispers after, _Rhaegar_, as if acquiring the taste of it. She acquires the taste of _him _soon enough, thick and sweet and hot in her mouth.

It is not love that brings him to bed, but duty. The dragon must have three heads, as he must have her. He has come to love the feel of her, though, stonesmooth and soft beneath his palms, and softer now that she carries his child. _Mother of dragons, bride of fire._

_._

VI.  
>The babe is a girl; of this he is certain. He dreams of her, silver of hair and blue of eye, amidst an expanse of wilderness, a dragon and a wolf to flank her. Sometimes she is a babe at a bloodless breast, pale as snow, sometimes a warrior girt in bloodied mail, but always hard of face and slender of build, a daughter of ice and fire. Already he calls her Visenya, murmurs her name into the curve of Lyanna's flesh. She will be a bride to his Aegon, and sister-wife to his Rhaenys, conquerors all.<p>

When he looks at last to Lyanna, before he takes leave of Visenya, of her, there is a quietness to her eyes that brings to mind a mute and sorrowed god.

.

VII.  
><em>Visenya,<em> he groans. A splay of rubies, poppy-bright, adorns the miry ford.

.

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.

**Lyanna**

I.  
>The room is filled with a cloying scent of blood and roses.<p>

She feels nothing beyond the ache, the fever-spread of blood that courses inside her. Strange it is to feel an ache that was not him, that was not Rhaegar, the child, her heart, her discontent, and stranger still neither balm nor love to help it.

_Open the window. Air. Light,_ she can hear one of the maids cry. _A dragon needs air and light._

Lyanna, quivering, curls up to watch the fading of the night, cold as it was the eve he wed her.

.

II.  
>However she knows or feels it, Rhaegar is dead. Yet the stars in their silent turmoil glimmer on, and the sun yet shines a gem incarnadine. How then can he be gone? How then can naught remain of him?<p>

There is nothing of Rhaegar in the boy that she can discern (_thank the gods_, she thinks weakly) in his dark looks and robust cries. Perhaps his lips, a little too thin, are more Rhaegar's than hers, and mayhaps he shall grow to be as strong and solemn as his father, as much a dragon, as much a man.

Whatever he shall grow to be, whatever truly became of Rhaegar, she will never know for certain.

.

III.  
><em>Promise me, Ned, the babe shall live. Let him live.<em>

She never hears the strained and tearful _yes_.

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><p>Sorry for the shite quality and the delay in posting. <em>Please<em> feel free to critique my work, particularly when it comes to syntax and dialogue. I'm well aware my syntax is an English teacher's worst nightmare, and I hate writing dialogue, so...


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